Ken Clarke is not the first Tory to surrender to the criminal class
It's a political myth that the Conservatives are tough on law and order, says Stephen Pollard
By Stephen Pollard
Stephen Pollard is editor of
the 'Jewish Chronicle'
14 Jul 2010
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Kenneth Clarke: Rising prison population not linked to fall in crime, says Kenneth Clarke
Kenneth Clarke Photo: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY
Ken Clarke deserves at least one accolade. In the 18 years of Conservative government from 1979, he was not the worst home secretary. That, however, is as far as the accolades go. Because in his current position as Justice Secretary, Mr Clarke has reverted to Tory type: liberal and wrong.
One of the more puzzling myths of politics is that Conservatives are tough on law and order, and Labour weak. That may be true for party members' views, but it bares no relation to how they behave in government. With the exception of Michael Howard at the finale, the Thatcher and Major governments were a penal liberal's dream; and the subsequent Labour years were built on the idea that prison does indeed work – even if policy fell well short of what was necessary.
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So when Mr Clarke pronounces, as he did on Tuesday, that "there is and never has been, in my opinion, any direct correlation between spiralling growth in the prison population and a fall in crime", he is merely repeating the mistaken doctrine hard-wired over many years into Conservative ministers' behaviour.
When Labour took office in 1997, there were 61,000 criminals in jail. When the party left office in May, there were 85,500. Mr Clarke – who thinks that figure is a disgrace – needs to answer a simple question: how many more crimes would have been committed this year if those additional 24,500 offenders had not been imprisoned?
In a Home Office survey in 2000, offenders about to start a sentence were asked how many crimes they had committed over the previous year. The average was 140 (257 for those on drugs). Taking that lower figure (even though the majority of prisoners have a drug or alcohol problem), one can make an estimate. Imprisoning 24,500 criminals who would otherwise have been at liberty to offend 140 times a year means that more than 3.4 million crimes were prevented.
The facts show that prison works. Take one year, April 2007 to April 2008, when the prison population increased by 1,843. Police-recorded crime fell by 476,900 offences. If the annual offending rate per perpetrator was 140, then 258,000 crimes were prevented.
The fundamental problem is that the public and the elites who run the criminal justice system, such as Mr Clarke, inhabit two different worlds. In the real world, knife crime is a threat, muggings and robberies are on the rise, and the police and criminal justice system appear to be more troubled by suspects' rights than their duty to protect the public; in the other world, the concerns are how to manage the system and how best to treat criminals for their social problems, since it is society's ills that create crime through poor housing, unemployment, bad schooling and poverty. Hence Mr Clarke's argument on Tuesday that the fall in crime after Michael Howard's time as home secretary was not because of "the policies of my successors as home secretary" but rather, "dare I gently hint, mine as chancellor of the exchequer at the beginning of a period of growth and strong employment".
Mr Clarke's suggestion is only to be expected from an ideology that refuses to accept individual responsibility as being the prime – indeed, in almost every case, the only – serious factor behind criminality. The received wisdom, for example, is that drug-related crime is proof of the victimhood of the offender, addicted to an illegal substance and barely responsible for his action. He needs treatment, not punishment. But it is not drug addicts who turn to crime; it is criminals who turn to drugs. A study conducted by the NHS in 1998, and kept as quiet as possible because its findings were inconvenient, examined 1,000 drug users. It found that even when on methadone, offenders continued to commit crimes. And a study in 1999 by South Bank University's criminal policy research unit found that most drug-using criminals were career criminals long before their drug use began.
The rot set in a long time ago. In 1959, a Home Office publication, Penal Practice in a Changing Society, discussed the "environmental" dimensions of crime, stressed the need for more research into its "varied and complex causes" and abjectly failed to offer any evidence for such dimensions and causes. In the Sixties a flood of similar papers were published, positing factors such as the "inner conflicts" of adolescence, the environmental pressures of school, housing, gangs and youth culture, "rapid social change" and more or less every other excuse one can think of.
Organisations such as the Howard League for Penal Reform, the Prison Reform Trust and the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (Nacro) fed off this wave of anti-prison, anti-punishment dogma, often spouting utter nonsense as fact. In 1993, for instance, Nacro claimed that 88 per cent of adult ex-offenders and 80 per cent of young ex-offenders on their training schemes did not reoffend, a statement that to this day they have not substantiated with evidence, and which would, had it been true, have signalled a breakthrough in human existence – a permanent solution to the problem of crime.
Please don't fall into the trap of thinking this is Left-wing ideology. One only needs to turn the clock back a few years to the tenure as home secretary of one of the most craven, complacent, conceited and catastrophic public figures of recent years: Douglas Hurd. As home secretary he presided over record crime increases, allowing more criminals to roam the streets than any of his predecessors and ruling out any notion of reducing crime. Lord Hurd's philosophy was Conservative penal tradition at its worst: that the purpose of policy was to stem the increase in crime. The thought of reducing it was laughed out of court.
No liberal penal idea was too much; any idea of punishment didn't bear contemplation. As home secretary, from 1985 to October 1989, Lord Hurd set out to reduce the prison population. The consequence was a rapid increase in crime. In 1985 there were 46,800 prisoners, rising to 50,000 in 1988 as judges responded to the consequent crime wave. But rather than back the judges, he cut the prison population so that it fell to 45,600 soon after he left. Police-recorded crime increased from 3.6 million in 1985 to 4.5 million in 1990. Yet even today he still bangs the drum for reducing prison numbers as chairman of the Prison Reform Trust.
The usual "fact" trotted out in support of reduction is that more people are jailed in the UK than in other comparable EU countries. We certainly imprison a higher percentage of the population. But this is meaningless; it takes no account of the extraordinary proportion of the UK population that commits crimes. Allowing for this, Britain has a low imprisonment rate.
In 2007, the average number of prisoners per 100,000 population across the EU was 122, compared with 147 in England and Wales. But the number of prisoners per 1,000 recorded crimes gives a very different picture. The EU average is 20.7; the figure for England and Wales is just 16.1. Eighteen of the 27 EU member states imprisoned a higher proportion than England and Wales. Today, a scarcely credible 0.3 per cent of offences result in a prison sentence.
British criminals are living in a golden age. Mr Clarke seems to think it's not golden enough.
Stephen Pollard is editor of
the 'Jewish Chronicle'
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